Jul 2 >1 | Why The World Needs SimFin

I still remember where I was in IE’s Master in Finance program when I learned about the Bloomberg Terminal business model. I’d used the terminals some throughout my undergrad degree, various internships in Manhattan and Shanghai, and was currently earning a certification from Bloomberg themselves when a rep repeated-

“$2,000 per month to lease the machine and that comes with [insert sales-y objection handling line about support staff and good stuff about connection speeds]”

Welcome to the Shitty/Awesome Spectrum

The Shitty/Awesome Spectrum. Read: every industry prior to disruption.

This spectrum pops up in all sorts of industries. Before investments in water treatment infrastructure it was tap water vs Evian. Before Khanacademy it was a library card vs expensive classes and tutors. And before Twitter and LinkedIn it was your personal network vs country club fees.

Financial information is no different. Google Finance and Yahoo Finance are free tools with limited manipulability and ease of access. Bloomberg, FactSet, and Reuters are expensive subscription models with highly manipulable data that restricts logins to certain machines and IP’s.

We’re building SimFin to break the spectrum.

What SimFin does

Take Tesla Motors for example. Currently undergoing a potential acquisition of Solarcity you might want to take a look at the financials of TSLA. Can they handle this acquisition? Will a better company result? To even begin asking the right questions we need a diagnosis based on fundamental analysis.

You could bang your head against Google Finance or the PDF of Tesla’s actual financial statements. And if you’re one of the solid gold losers that actually own a Bloomberg Terminal odds are you aren’t reading this.

Want to look up an executive’s history? Search their name, just like on a Bloomberg Terminal.

This is only the first iteration of the platform. Obviously there will be bugs. We have a long way to improve but we’re excited for a number of reasons.

Why SimFin matters

During graduate school my team and I won the CFA Institute Research Challenge. We would not have won had we not had access to multiple Bloomberg Terminals and knew how to use them. Most individual investors don’t. Most business school students don’t.

We live in a digital age. Information is a commodity and the only barrier to education should be your own curiosity. It’s downright criminal that our society charges for publicly available information to truly be available.

SimFin is free to use, free to share, and free to download/upload. The database is built by our proprietary crawler-bot and our community of users. As a user you become a financial author.

If you’re a professor, an investor, or a student — we built SimFin for you.

This is the Gutenberg moment for financial literacy.

Who is SimFin

We are a distributed team operating in Germany, Spain, and the US. We are graduates of the IE Master in Finance program. We are winners of the CFA Institute Research Challenge. We are coders, bankers, and students. We are a group passionate about free, robust tools. And we fight for the user.

Thank you for reading. We’d be honored if you’d recommend the article, share it with your networks, and (most importantly) begin to use SimFin yourself! Please let us know any issues or ideas you may have.